Crop

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT CROP - PAGE 3

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Brian Peterson admitted it’s hard to watch as floodwaters envelop the bright green cornstalks now about knee-height, but he said he’ll survive the loss at his farm along the Missouri River in western Iowa. And experts said the nation will be OK, too, even after another in a series of events that have cut into the supply of corn, a crop that is the backbone of much of the world’s food supply. ‘‘It will hurt, but it won’t destroy me,’’ said Peterson, who has seen water submerge about 40 of his 200 acres of corn.

KATERINI, Greece (AP) - Hammered by the financial crisis that has led to ever diminishing income, a group of residents in northern Greece have joined forces with potato farmers to slash consumer prices and ensure producers can get their crop to markets by cutting out the middle man. Hundreds of families turned up Saturday in this northern Greek town to buy potatoes at massively reduced prices, sold directly by producers at cost price. They lined up in cars and with bicycles, on foot and with scooters to collect their bags of spuds from a truck that flung its doors wide open and was doing a roaring trade in the parking lot of a local courthouse.

While recently conducting sunflower surveys quite a distance from my office, I stopped in a farmyard to ask where I might find sunflower fields in the area. The farmer/rancher was very helpful and asked if I would let him know what I came up with for a yield estimate as he had a good percentage of them contracted. As we visited, the topic of private crop consultants came up and he highly complimented the agronomist who monitored his fields on a weekly basis and provided recommendations.

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - Farmers say they're pleased with efforts by the federal Risk Management Agency to clarify rules for prevented planting insurance in five Upper Midwest states. The insurance pays farmers if their cropland is too wet or dry to plant. They must meet certain rules to qualify, and confusion over those rules led many farmers, particularly in North Dakota, to wonder if they would qualify on land they couldn't plant last spring because of wet weather. North Dakota's congressional delegation asked the Risk Management Agency to clarify the rules, and the agency has done so starting with the 2014 crop year.

BRANDON - With both hands holding it open, Fadjar Setiawan plunged a small, clear plastic bag into the cascade of soybeans flowing from a truck unloading at the Eastern Farmers Cooperative in Brandon. With a pen, he labeled the sample. Before sealing it, he extracted a few beans. On one bean, he pointed to the hilum, the eye that attaches a bean to the pod. In this case, it was pale yellow, almost white. "This is what we like to see," he said. He bit down tentatively on another bean.

Many farmers look forward each year for the various SDSU crop variety trial results. The winter wheat trial results are always the first completed and published in August to help producers make variety decisions. Spring wheat, oats, alfalfa (if applicable), corn, soybeans, sunflowers and flax follow as the plots are harvested and the data compiled. Trial results for 2012, and several years back can be found on iGrow at: http://igrow.org/ agronomy/profit-tips/varietytrial-results/.

A new study from the Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University was published last week showing that satellite imagery revealed 1.3 million acres of grassland have been converted to corn/soybeans from 2006 through 2011 in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa. Those results are frightening at first, until you read into the study. What's not being reported as the study continues in its media rounds from one newspaper to the next is that the satellites used couldn't distinguish between different grasses, retired cropland, CRP, hay, alfalfa and other similar crops.

SIOUX FALLS (AP) - The Agriculture Department is projecting this year's winter wheat crop in South Dakota at 71.3 million bushels, up 12 percent from last year. Average yield is forecast at 46 bushels per acre, down 3 bushels from last year, but harvested acres are expected to increase by 250,000 to just under 1.6 million. It would be South Dakota's third-largest winter wheat crop on record. Nationally, winter wheat production is pegged at 1.42 billion bushels, down 4 percent from 2010

BROOKINGS - At some point, we knew that large inversion between old crop and new crop prices would converge, and that it would likely be a relatively fast change. However, the suddenness and speed with which that occurred over the last couple weeks was still shocking, said Darrell R. Mark, Adjunct Professor of Economics at South Dakota State University. "Old crop September corn futures have dropped $1.34 per bushel since late June and basis fell from $0.80 to $1.25 per bushel across the country," he said.

The North Dakota State University Extension Service has updated the Crop Compare program, which is a spreadsheet designed to compare cropping alternatives. The program uses the direct costs and yields from the 2013 projected crop budgets for nine regions of North Dakota, but producers are encouraged to enter the expected yields and input costs for their farm. The user designates a reference crop and enters its expected market price. Depending on the region, a broad selection of nine to 18 crops are compared.